Item ‘Variations’ not showing on GoShippo packing slip

[echocl]

We use GoShippo for batch printing of packing slips and shipping labels. The packing slip does not show an Item’s Variation. Variation does show on a Square packing slip for the same orders. This is a problem as we rely on Variations to distinguish several of our most popular items in our online store. GoShippo customer support says that Square Item Variations do show on other orders so they said it’s a problem Square needs to address.

Reached out to Square customer service today but the person I was connected to did not know what to do with this problem (I told her to forward to Online store engineering).

Has anyone else experienced this problem?  

[TheRealChipA]

Hi @echocl.  Interesting.  I have a couple of questions.  First, I am assuming that you mean the Shippo integration with Square, since I can’t find a GoShippo integration.  Just want to verify that.

Secondly, as I understand that integration, once you connect Shippo to Square, you click an import orders button and then are able to review what is imported before printing.  Can you provide a screen shot of that import that shows that the variations are not there?  I’m asking for this reason.  Shippo controls the import process.  They send a request to Square for the information they need.  It sounds like they aren’t requesting variations, or that they are requesting them incorrectly.  But this is not something Square can control.  They can only provide what they are asked for.

Third, I do not understand what you mean by the statement “GoShippo customer support says that Square Item Variations do show on other orders.”  What “other orders” are they referring to?

In my experience, if a third-party app is not working correctly, it is usually because something changed with the APIs and they missed it, or they introduced a bug in the import process.  I’m pretty confident that is the case here since, as you point out, Square shipping labels show the variations.  Obviously, they exist and Shippo could get them if they wanted/did it correctly.  Also, every time I’ve used a third-party app and they told me “it is Square’s fault” it was always theirs.  And I’m not kidding.  Every time.  Let’s see if we can collect enough evidence to prove this one way or the other.

I’ll look for your reply and get back to you as quickly as I can.

[echocl]

Thanks for the speedy reply Chip. Yes, I mean Shippo - I’m in the habit of calling it Goshippo because that is their domain name.

I’ll get the other details tomorrow and attach here.

enna

[TheRealChipA]

You’re welcome, and perfect.  Hopefully we can get to the bottom of this pretty quickly.  Have a great evening.

[echocl]

in response to your questions Chip:

1. yes, Shippo 

2. there is no "import orders" button per se: our Square online store is connected to Shippo so orders are imported automatically, we don't have to import manually (Shippo did operate this way a few years ago but I think the integration must have been updated)

3. you are absolutely right: we have no orders in the system that have a 'variation' so I don't know what they were referring to. We recently migrated the online store back to Square from Shopify, so we have recent orders from Shopify that have variations, but nothing from the Square store as of yet, with the exception of the Item that is not showing variations on Shippo packing slips.

[echocl]

did some more digging. It is my error: it is the Modifier that is not showing on packing slip.

I am going to add Variations to this product, which DO appear to print as expected on Shippo packing slips. 

[JohnPugh]

We also ran into the MODIFER not showing up on Shippo. Is there any fix to this at all? We need this info for custom orders (names, etc) 

[TheRealChipA]

@JohnPugh.  Unfortunately, this seems to be a limitation in Shippo and it would require that you talk to them directly.  From what @echocl and I could figure out, Shippo is not requesting modifier information from Square and is not making modifier data available for labels, currently.  

Of course, from their point of view which is printing shipping labels, yours is not exactly a typical use case.  Still, you should talk with their support team or maybe they have a board showing feature requests and their statuses that you could search.  Just remember, when it comes to third-party apps that integrate with Square, those apps only use the information that they request from Square.  Square can’t tell them to “use this instead” because that wouldn’t be correct in every case.

Also, have you looked at the recent changes to Square’s shipping label functionality?  I can’t be sure it would work for you, but I know they’ve consolidated and enhanced that operation, and even made it available in the Retail POS app, I think.  Just a thought, since I don’t use shipping and am not fully up on the details of Square’s recent enhancements.